Barney MacFarlane
It’s worse with Corden in it
Let me introduce you
to the internet version
of the pub bore
Quintin Jardine
Catalonia and language
SR’s remarkable growth as an independent magazine is based largely on word of mouth. Here are examples of our journalism:
* SR played a leading role in the successful campaign to save St Margaret of Scotland Hospice
* SR campaigned for greater transparency in Scottish public life and won a landmark judgement from the Scottish information commissioner which has led to a transformation in the information available about executive salaries and pensions in public bodies
* Having discovered elderly people still living in a near-derelict block of flats in Glasgow, sometimes without a water supply, SR campaigned to have them decently re-housed. With the help of Scotland’s housing minister, Alex Neil, we succeeded
* SR continues to campaign – so far without success – to broaden the range of appointments to national organisations beyond a self-perpetuating elite
The system just isn’t
working. Can we change
direction before it’s too late?
Dennis Smith
Postmodernist theory is not the force it once was: the juggernaut of fashion has trundled on. It cannot be defended as being true or progressive: these
are concepts which postmodernists are committed to deconstructing.
Then I had to go off and get a job in the ‘real world’ and my intellectual development slowed to a crawl (it happens to all of us sooner or later). So I missed the full impact of post-structuralism and its offshoots like deconstruction and ‘theory’ – the whole package that makes up postmodernism. To simplify radically, postmodernism abandons the constraints mentioned above – real communities situated in an objective world.
Postmodernists take it as given (but not proved) that all our beliefs are determined by structures of power (Foucauld) or by free-floating desires (Deleuze and Guattari). There is no way out of the maze of language into a shared world of facts or objects (Il n’y a pas de hors-texte – Derrida). Worse, there are no stable standpoints within language because meanings are continually sliding off into something different. Closure is perpetually deferred (a bit like following an infinite series of hypertext links). In this context concepts like truth, reason and objectivity lose their purchase.
My nostrils twitch when I see the word ‘narrative’ because I know I am being told a story (at ‘metanarrative’ they vibrate violently). The story may be plausible and pleasing but it cannot be true. It cannot be challenged by reference to verifiable facts, only by the creation of another (equally fictional) counter-narrative. Conspicuously, much of the media now trades in stories, not facts.
These fashionable philosophical ideas have interacted with earlier visions – the American dream, the Hollywood fantasy. For many people identity has now become a fiction: you can always reinvent yourself, become who you desire. With new media this is easy. The problem here is not just that people live increasingly in a virtual world but that they flit constantly between different virtual worlds, often under different aliases. Online role-play games are an extreme example. Here virtual actions appear to have no real-world consequences. In this dreamscape, ideas of personal identity, moral responsibility and community lose their focus. Cyberspace is not a shared public space.
All this produces a kind of fatalism. Narratives spin in an endless vacuum. In politics the same mantra is repeated right across the spectrum – there is no alternative. Though they strenuously deny kinship, Marxists and neoliberals are driven by very similar visions of economic determinism.
Like many others I am unhappy with this outcome. I want to cling to some tattered humanist belief in reason, truth and human agency. But – a postmodernist might say – this merely shows how my beliefs are determined by my genealogy. To this argument at least I think there is a decisive response. The postmodernist is contradicting himself by appealing to just the kind of objective law-like determinism that – on his own premises – cannot exist.
Postmodernist theory is not the force it once was: the juggernaut of fashion has trundled on. It cannot be defended as being true or progressive: these are concepts which postmodernists are committed to deconstructing. But its influence lingers on, aided by the dynamics of technological change.
Time is irreversible for us humans. There is no crawling back to old comfort blankets. But the current global financial meltdown suggests that the dominant economic and intellectual paradigms of the past 30 years are in deep trouble. The system just isn’t working. If postmodernism and economic determinism are locked together in a grim dance of death, we may yet be able to free ourselves from their baleful gaze and change direction before it is too late.
